Framework for Moderation

Since the purpose of this thread is figuring out whether improvements can be made to conflict resolution and moderation process and policies, can you describe generally what your other efforts tend to look like and how they tend to go?

No, especially given you're one of the people I've historically muted. I find it inordinately tiring to (endlessly) debate this stuff, and find requests to explain why I'm opposed to what I believe to be anti-vaxxers and Nazi enablers very frustrating.

This is how good instances turn into bad ones IMHO; I'm one step away from quitting social.coop ( http://social.coop ) for the second time.

I did not see the posts in question, but I just looked up Jem Bendell's writings on COVID and this is definitely someone with a history of misrepresenting data to downplay the efficacy of vaccines.

From https://jembendell.com/2022/10/09/theyve-gone-too-far-with-the-children-so-what-do-we-do/

UK data from the Office of National Statistics for the year until the end of January 2022 showed that confidence about the effectiveness of vaccines against hospitalisation and death was premature. Although being doubly vaccinated reduced likelihood of death for most of 2021, after Omicron arrived the death rates in the doubly vaccinated but unboosted rapidly grew to higher than in those who had never been vaccinated (across all age groups). This was graphically represented by the ONS until early April 2022 when they removed the graphs, so we can see them using the wayback engine for their website at the end of March 2022. Is this an anomaly? Official data from USA finds something similar.  Vaccinated Californians had a higher rate of hospitalizations (severe illness) than those who were unvaccinated but had prior immunity from a past infection. The government did not do that analysis of its own data, but it is easy to do for yourself. That is enough reason for us to keep watching this issue – and one of the best places to observe this issue is Australia, because it still collects and releases decent data.

This is a classic data misuse technique where you start with one claim "confidence about the effectiveness of vaccines against hospitalisation and death was premature," change the topic slightly to a different question, "Vaccinated Californians had a higher rate of hospitalizations (severe illness) than those who were unvaccinated but had prior immunity from a past infection," and then cite data that actually refutes the original claim as if it supported it.

The latter citation leads to this graph, which shows that vaccination provided 6-8 fold protection compared to unvaccinated in the Fall of 2021. Yes for the Omicron wave specifically (but not any previous wave, BTW), those who had previous suffered COVID did enjoy similar and likely even better protection compared to those who were vaccinated, but that's a different claim. That's the question of "are the vaccines more effective than previous COVID infection" which is entirely different from the stated claim of "the effectiveness of vaccines against hospitalisation," which the cited data clear show they were.

Also consider the conclusion of the article that was cited:

What are the implications for public health practice?

Although the epidemiology of COVID-19 might change as new variants emerge, vaccination remains the safest strategy for averting future SARS-CoV-2 infections, hospitalizations, long-term sequelae, and death. Primary vaccination, additional doses, and booster doses are recommended for all eligible persons. Additional future recommendations for vaccine doses might be warranted as the virus and immunity levels change. 

So my point here is that @Matthew Slater 's comment frames it like it is a foregone conclusion that the removal of Jem's posts was an undesirable moderation result, but based on this history I don't think we should accept that framing.

Thanks for looking into this Will.

I think it is perfectly acceptable to cite data in an article which draws different conclusions from the data. I've seen papers which draw wrong conclusions from their own data because they are only written for the headlines.

I see how Bendell makes one claim and then switches to a closely related claim, but he says what he is doing and why - because the UK stopped publishing that data. I don't see what is being misrepresented here, and your assertion of 'misinformation' seems very strong. I know Bendell very well and I know that he acts in good faith and professionalism.

I would rather be confused and undecided about these technical matters than have them filtered for me by people who, for all I know, might have different standards of truth for different opinions. Wouldn't you agree that claims for vaccine efficacy were criminally exaggerated in the early days and hence siding with the skeptics was/is quite a reasonable course of action?

Doug, I don't know what conflicts we've ever even had, and I'm barely active on Mastodon. I would really love to somehow clarify misunderstandings (or whether even you are mistaking me for someone else). I'm struggling with plain text to guess how much I could even say effectively. I take it you feel exasperated right now, and I just want to express my sympathies.

I deleted a longer reply I first posted. It's for a discussion between people willing to discuss. Would you please clarify whether you are at all open to discussing here on Loomio what we as a co-op can do to improve the experience you are having in this community? I don't want to add to your frustration by presuming your willingness. I appreciate you for sharing your thoughts and feelings here.

To just point out one bit of clarity for anyone reading: I was not in any way asking for explanations about objections to vaccine-skeptics etc. I was asking whether people are doing anything besides muting, blocking, or replying. The things suggested by the conflict resolution guidelines (https://wiki-dev.social.coop/Conflict_resolution_guide ) are private communication to posters (not to argue about the topic but to express feedback/requests about the conduct issues), asking for help, and filing formal CoC report. I think we can expand that with more specific guidance and other options. So, my question was whether people are only muting, blocking, replying, or nothing. Are people asking for help and reporting issues, and if so is that not working well?

I saw that in Jem Bendell's posts, too, and this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. To be clear, I think the document Emi initially posted is terrific, and it's a great resource in a small group of people who are committed to enlightened interactions. Unfortunately, this group is already too large for that and we already have "challenges," so that document is like the obelisk at the start of Kubrik's 2001.

We need a more complex protocol. The question is, how do we determine if a person is willing and able to build a bridge? Frankly, I looked at Jem Bendell's posts, one of which included a link to Rumble, and I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to build a bridge with him, or people like Mathew Slater who are shilling for him. We'll just end up going in circles and waste time.

I think a sound policy, or the beginning of one, could be to check posts against resources like this:

https://realityteam.org/factflood/

If a post is demonstrably false, already debunked, etc, I think moderators need to be able to issue a warning, one warning only or we risk a bad actor stringing us along. Then, moderators delete the post (or add a content warning, if that's technically viable and appropriate). If there are repeated offenses, then the person gets kicked out of social.coop, as in excised, out the airlock. This would send a very clear message both to people testing to see what they can get away with, and to regular users who might feel that this site isn't moderating effectively.

Strong agreement. We need to be proactive at blocking harms right away. Then, we can have processes for restoration/resolution etc. once it's clear that contentious risky things are limited. Otherwise, we lose people and the community degrades. What I want to see is the enlightened-small-group-ideals etc all in place for what happens after the initial stop-harm actions.

So, newcomers should find out right away that they do not get away with almost anything problematic. However, we don't then just feel done then. We then want to onboard people with human connection and understanding and support people in becoming constructive co-op members and building skill at discussing controversial things with due care and sensitivity.

So, it's a yes-and approach I'm suggesting, not a dichotomy of passivity vs blunt blocking as the only choices.

I've been vaguely paying attention to this discussion for a while, and haven't wanted to get involved, beacuse it's not my field, but it feels like things are getting a bit crazy in here right now. To suggest that someone like Professor Jem Bendell is in some way a 'bad actor' seems nonsensical to me. He's a respected academic who, as far as I'm aware, is focussed on an objective and rigorous scientific approach. And to use pejorative language to describe Matthew Slater, someone who I know and have a lot of time for, indicates to me that this debate may be losing its grip on common sense.

Yes, we all want social.coop to work well and be successful, and that means having a useful policy framework that can help moderators to do their work fairly and in the spirit of cooperation and tolerance in which I hope this place is founded, encouraging users in turn to be cooperative and tolerant. If the intent is instead to ensure that social.coop stops people like Jem and Matthew from contributing then I fear that cooperation and tolerance are long gone. And if that's the case, then I will most likely go too.

It is January 2023. We are no longer "in the early days", and the context and data around Covid vaccines and the associated discourse has vastly changed.

Lest anyone think that @Doug Belshaw is an outlier, I'll say that I, too, have recently been forced to start muting and blocking folks in the social.coop timeline, and have started to strongly consider moving instances. social.coop has never been perfect, but it feels like we are not trending in the right direction.

I made an attempt at engaging on this thread early on, wanting to try to give Matthew Slater the benefit of the doubt. It's clear to me now that he is a right-wing troll -- "anti-woke", in his own words (for anyone who might want some context on the term, see e.g: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/20/anti-woke-race-america-history).

Since this thread, despite being titled "Framework for Moderation", actually seems to be about Matthew's complaints on moderation of Bendell's posts, and since I do not think that trolls can actually be appeased, I shall do my best to stay away from this conversation from now on. (Pray for me, y'all.)

But perhaps we do need a separate, serious discussion on what is our collective stance in the face of such members.

Much love to the folks of the CWG, who have to deal with this shit all the time. 💗

@Matthew Slater said:

Wouldn't you agree that claims for vaccine efficacy were criminally exaggerated in the early days and hence siding with the skeptics was/is quite a reasonable course of action?

That's not an assertion that we are in the early days now. He was describing an opinion about what was the early days (i.e. the very beginning of vaccine availability in late 2020 and early 2021).

I happen to not agree with the ironically exaggerated language of "criminally exaggerated". The public messaging around covid was indeed exaggerated, flip-flopping, problematic, hypocritical… and the best views I found were from people like Zeynep Tufekci. The hyperbole of "criminal" to describe the tragedy of incompetent public messaging seems unhelpful though.

Anyway, the key point IMO is that the co-op should not take a hard-line position on discussions of vaccines but should take some sort of hard-line position on use of triggering and provocative language around identified sore-spots.

We could still make a democratic decision that vaccine-skepticism is too much of a landmine and so we simply ban it as a topic despite acknowledging that doing so is an unfortunately blunt decision. I would personally prefer that we mark certain topics like vaccine-skepticism as "sensitive" and require extra care such as that all mention of identified sensitive topics get specific CW's and hashtags and avoid provocative language.

In short: there are all sorts of policies and tools that fit different levels between unhealthy tolerance (i.e. allowing harms to the community, such as turning away lots of people) and zero-tolerance.

I believe reactions like yours and Doug's are typical and are representative of the harms caused by allowing problem posts to keep going. The top priority IMO is to take immediate action to make sure people like you and Doug (and so many silent others) feel welcome and reassured enough to stick around.

Making sense of how fair it is to judge Matthew as a right-wing troll has to come later (and ideally wouldn't be asserted like this if we can cut off initial tensions sooner, so you don't feel exasperated). The story in my mind is that defensive frustrated people are more quick to judge and that supposed trolls also dig in defensively when threatened, labeled, and targeted as the problem (ironically escalating the conflict in their defensiveness). Incidentally, I have no reason myself (in what little I've seen) to think anyone on any side of this is here in bad-faith. I don't believe that can be effectively discussed at all while people are "hot" with immediate reactions, feeling constricted and defensive. If someone really is persistently toxic, we will still see that when we are calm and reflective.

We need ways to cut off the immediate conflicts in order to then deescalate and figure out later what to do when we're more relaxed. We need ways to temporarily block things while expressing to everyone that it's about addressing the immediate tensions and that we have a due process to help everyone willing to work on being constructive and accommodating co-op members.

I called this discussion in hope of tightening up the moderation guidelines and I have been dismissed, by name, for the first time in my life I might add, as shilling disinformation, as anti-woke, and a right wing troll.

Let me remind you, I haven't abused or insulted anyone here. I've listened and been polite at all times. Yesterday on the site somebody accused me of 'spreading misinformation' and then blocked me. IRL that's called slander, and talking behind someone's back.

There's nothing more I can do here. It feels the worst parts of pre-Musk twitter, with a veneer of cooperative righteousness, which I find ugly. So this is goodbye. A troll leaving of his own accord. Right.

Thanks, Aaron, I think this is helpful. I also hope people will cool down, take time away if needed, and then think about how we can help improve our moderation and, more importantly, the relationship-building that builds trust and patience.

I truly hope that social.coop does not turn into a place where someone's ideas of political correctness and scientific correctness beat out actual science and respectful political discussion. We have twitter for that.

We so badly need social spaces where the harms of capitalism don't basically control the discourse. It looks from where I sit that a lot of the US mainstream media is under substantial control by capital in the US, and this is true in many other countries too. So for example I don't consider the sources on the list at https://realityteam.org/factflood/ of "the most reliable national news sites" very comforting. In journalism, as well as in public health, we have some crazy mix of non-bought people in all positions trying to do the right thing and provide useful information, vs. people in positions of supposed public trust who will lie to beef up their stock portfolio, politicians who will lie to satisfy their biggest donors, people who have to lie to keep their job, etc.

I also think we need to allow people to develop informed opinions and decisions; and raise our levels of critical thinking ability, in safe spaces. I find the level of "I am right and I will protect people from you and protect you from other people" making an appearance above to be somewhat scary in the way that our society's control of "truth" is scary now. In the way that the McCarthy era in the 1950's in the US was scary.

I'm not an expert in moderation. And it is a thorny issue. But as of now, having read through the relevant conversations of the last days, I would agree with the position that moderation should address speech that is directly aimed at hurting people in some way, or inciting hurt, or even just mean and disrespectful. I don't think we want to, or even can given the resources and level of governance it would take, moderate for what is actually science, especially when presented respectfully with links to studies. It's a moving target by its nature (the scientific method), it is co-opted in so many ways, and more information is good.

Also, fortunately, people can follow, mute, block who they want. That seems to me like a perfectly OK way for people to manage their social networks.

To emphasize, this is my 2 cents as a person who does not have moderation experience, and does not often run into disrespect because my networks are small and I spend less time on social media than anyone I know. I could be wrong about some of the above, but I don't think I'm wrong about the danger that "I will control what (respectfully delivered) content you can hear" presents in this stage of capitalism.

Hi @Matthew Slater can you confirm whether you are a currently social coop member? Your mastodon profile page says you have left the coop and I couldn't find you among the contributors on Open Collective

I have no other knowledge, but maybe that's because he quit? As he posted here 50min before your question

Ah thanks, I missed that comment.

Hi folks, look, we here on social.coop have been buffeted by a couple of big waves. First, Covid, with all the trauma (lives lost, physical damage), anxiety, fear, confusion, overwork, etc. that comes with it. I would be a liar if I didn't say that three years of constant concern hasn't taken a toll on me. Not to mention the mental labor of sorting out my understanding and response to changing information and policy in a highly charged atmosphere. And the toll of physical isolation.

Second, the recent influx of former/continuing Twitter users, who often bring with them a culture of anger, defensiveness, contempt, provocation-outrage, etc. (along with some great content and insights!) The first wave of Twitter users in 2018, and the reactions of existing members, nearly destroyed SC, but ultimately led us to make crucial improvements and build a better culture.

Moreover, we have grown rapidly -- this influx is much bigger -- and are finding our existing protocols and organization practices tested. Changes are needed, but I think our current Code of Conduct and Conflict Resolution Guidelines are both "good enough for now" and "safe enough to use." The immediate challenge we face is what to do when members refuse to follow the guidelines (e.g., by escalating) and reject the efforts of community working group ops team members to encourage good behavior and facilitate conflict resolution.

So far, our experience on the CWG ops team has been that people are usually willing to engage with us and take steps to resolve conflicts, even when they think we are wrong, for example by using content warnings or editing a post. People routinely post about controversial subjects and others decide if and how to respond, including by muting/blocking, if they wish. But, in the case of Covid vaccine related content, this hasn't been the case. That's why we on the ops team are looking for additional approaches and guidance. To that end we opened this discussion, knowing that there was a risk of further conflict and loss of members. I think there is a lot of useful content in this thread.

Soon, in the next couple of months, we need to hold elections for the CWG ops team, so maybe it would be good to have some live sessions to introduce the work involved and help new people come in. We have encouraged people to join our meetings to see how what we do and how we do it.

I'm looking for suggestions for trainng/learning materials on moderation, de-escalation, conflict resolution, etc. I admit to being in over my head on these topics but I want to contribute to and support the community.

There would be so much to say on multiple levels - I just wish everyone all the support and care they need beyond this little forum to process the emotional stress such confrontations can individually cause.

@Matt: "The immediate challenge we face is what to do when members refuse to follow the guidelines (e.g., by escalating) and reject the efforts of community working group ops team members to encourage good behavior and facilitate conflict resolution."

From my POV and recent experience you are doing enough to offer discussion about problematic toots. Right now you are going public with some of your routines, and that is an important second step.

Usually there is one moderator in charge for a specific case and handles the communication, while consulting their peers if needed. As far as I know, the conflicting user is confronted with an ad-hoc group decision at a certain point of escalation and more drastic one-sided measures are taken. After that policing operation the reprimanded user has an option to appeal (never encountered this on either side of the show), there will be a revision and a final decision. So far so good.

Since you are an elected member of the democratic legitimated moderation team and there is a code of conduct which was self imposed by the coop members in their current version, you have the mandate to interprete and enforce the rules to the best of your knowledge.

Mistakes might be made, a learning process takes place, possibly there could be efforts to make this more transparent to faciliate public control and the development of merit and trust.

So, what to do if a member does not cooperate? I am a Newbie, and I was not aware of the scope of the contract I was entering. This changed very quickly and we had our handshake. I was corrected, and I changed my course - to something better I was used to elsewhere.

If a member does not cooperate, you will explain the consequences, and if this does not help, you are going to boot them. That is the burden of your office. The reactions of the witnesses may be mixed, you are facing consequences yourself by no later than the next elections. So you will try to do your best, if not anyway out of principle.

If this discussion here works out as intended, you will not have a handful of factions beating each other up, but a consensus born out of compromise.

To discuss Covid is a quagmire. There is less light than we wish for, hopefully we will know better in some years. But now we are in the midst of it, albeit this is not the topic at hand.

I understand you need more appropriate directives for your work.

Can we agree to add something like:

Inacceptable: false claims, abuse of scientific sources, etc.

Discouraged: pretence to belong with established disourse communities

Encouraged: adhering to the standards of academic writing in case you are presenting, interpreting or questioning scientific topics.

Mind you, I do not attribute any of this to preceding toots, it is just about what we ask of a toot to qualify. I suggest to keep it on that level, even if some review takes place here.

This might alleviate discussions about toots and your work in the future - which seems urgently necessary to me.

Edit: I will refrain from posting for the rest of the week. Thanks for your patience.

For what it's worth, we have tried to give them every benefit of the doubt (long past what was due, IMO). They don't have to agree with everything in the social.coop code of conduct, or the spirit in which we enforce it, but these two have repeatedly argued with the moderators, refused to make changes, re-posted things we've deleted that other users have reported, etc.

When we say "use a content warning on this type of post please", the answer is to either appeal it to the community or just say "I disagree, but yah, sure, for the sake of the community who didn't like it I'll start doing that". Attacking the moderators, refusing to follow up, or just re-posting it, etc. is a problem.

I'd also like to caution us all in this thread a bit: let's not feed the trolls and turn this into arguing over whether COVID Is real or not; the point isn't whether the thing you were moderated for is correct or not, and that's going to make this discussion less useful. While I personally think we should simply ban posting anti-vax stuff, that is not the problem here. The problem is how they responded to the community and, after escalation, the moderators asking them to stop.

Hi @Scott McGerik, thanks for raising this question. I'm not aware of any trainings, unfortunately. A few folks in our research lab, which specializes in working with communities on moderation questions, has been brainstorming whether to co-design with communities a "summer school" of short weekly session that are accessible to folks who want to do or already do this work, even as volunteers. Would be interested to hear more about the demand for it (outside of this thread would be best I think).

Because the goal of the thread is to propose updates to the code of conduct, it would be very helpful if someone from the community working group could clarify which problems they are trying to solve with the update. Apparently one problem is users ignoring content moderation actions, but it's not obvious how the guidance in this piece would mitigate an enforcement problem. It also sounds like there are other challenges that content moderators are grappling with, but normal users do not necessarily know what those are. With more complete information, we could provide more relevant feedback.

[edited from a similar post I made on Matrix] I want to apologize for some of my confusion and overly-long replies here. I think I now better see some of the issues.

The key point: the CoC does not have anything adequate in it to address disinformation. I am wary about how it could possibly be done, but we have to have some capacity to defer to the CoC in removing harmful disinformation.

I have been overly focused on conflict-resolution (and too compulsive in my unsuccessful efforts to help resolve immediate tensions). I still think conflict-resolution and various intermediate forms of moderation are essential and that we clearly have some missing processes and norms for those. That does not in any way reduce the need to update the CoC. We need both.

The link in the initial post here was all about conflict-resolution and healthy communication, so I focused on that, thinking that was the topic. But the covid-debate clearly brings up the need to support some sort of CoC around disinformation. How can figure out some CoC wording that supports the CWG in moderating such things without being too blunt and too deferential to whatever the dominant mainstream view of topics happens to be?

I think some of the current information/disinformation controversies, including those that MatSlats and Jem Bendell have been involved in, are lose-lose arguments. For example, vax vs anti-vax. The official maintstream views of these topics have lost credibility with many people, because the official sources, including the US government, have lost credibility. And many of the "alternative" sources are unreliable, too.

So if the moderators allow these topics, they could take over the space, and drown out all other topics, because many of the arguers are passionate about their opinions, often on both sides of the issue.

So I think it might help to create an alternative channel for such arguments. I don't know exactly how that would be done, might need to be a centralized Mastodon site where moderators can redirect such topics.

Alternatively, the moderators could offer an easy way to filter out aguments about such topics. Like, I would immediately filter out vaccination, vax, and anti-vax.

This is an alternative to banning the people. Both MatSlats and Jem Bendell do good work and provide very useful info on other topics and I follow both of them and do not want to see them banned.

This is also a separate conversation that's worth having, but I'd also like to stress that they're redirecting the conversation this way and we shouldn't allow it to be redirected. The problem with these two users in particular isn't just that they posted content that the moderators think is harmful and should not be allowed on the instance, it's the way they responded to us reaching out to discuss it (by ignoring what we told them and re-posting things we'd removed, hurling abuse at us and other users, etc.) Even if we accepted for the sake of argument that their content was okay, we still need a good framework for moderation and some sort of consequences for creating an unwelcoming space for other members of the co-op.

EDIT: to clarify, because I think I confused myself when writing that, what I'm saying is that they violated the CoC as it stands today and continue to do so with their aggressive behavior, regardless of the specific content.

@Sam Whited thanks for the quick response. So your comment is about behavior about moderator decisions, not the topics themselves. But...

they posted content that the moderators think is harmful and should not be allowed on the instance

...was that anti-vax stuff? (Just to see if I am understanding the situation...)

That's correct; I just want to make sure that we don't get too deep down the rabbit hole of litigating whether vaccines are real or not when the real problem that needs to be addressed in the CoC is how moderators deal with bad behavior. Although, this was not actually the thread I thought it was (oops!) so maybe both are worth discussing.

@Sam Whited and all: I think a framework for moderation needs to have a graduated range of methods for dealing with controversies, from polite requests not to do that, to allowing people to easily filter out stuff that they don't want to clog their timelines, to deleting posts, to banning people.

And also methods for people to appeal moderator decisions.

Indeed. My first step when someone reports something like this (for users on our server, users on other servers I generally just skip to a limit or a ban depending on how bad the content is, and of course if the content is extremely harmful I might skip ahead a step or two depending on what it is) is to to first ask the reporter if they're comfortable discussing it with the person that was reported, if not I delete the posts in question, then reach out to the user and inform them that this was potentially a CoC violation and ask them not to do it again. Normally, that's enough. However if a user gets aggressive, or continues posting the same stuff, I think limiting their account is a good idea (existing followers can still interact and you can search for that user and find them, but they don't show up in the timelines of others and their posts don't show up in search results unless you're searching for that particular post, eg. by typing in its URL).

If the posts are extremely harmful a provisional limit (or a ban if we don't even think the people following them will want to see the stuff they're now posting) that lasts until the moderation team can discuss it is probably the way to go. If it's an outright ban from the co-op that we think is the only solution, I assume we'd have to bring that up with the broader membership for a vote.

At any time the user could of course go on Loomio, post in our group to discuss it with the all the moderators, or even bring it to the attention of the full community who can probably override us if we overstep.

Thanks @Sam Whited this comment is really helpful to me - understanding now the goal of this thread is frameworks/policies for the individuals' behavior in response to the Mastodon moderation action. I was thinking of "moderation" only the the sense of Mastodon post moderation.

Do you think a CoC addition about respecting CWG decisions would help? For example, under "3. Encouraged Behaviour. I will..." add:

• Honor the decisions of the elected CWG and use the CWG election process as the means to address and resolve disagreements on moderation policies

"So I think it might help to create an alternative channel for such arguments. I don't know exactly how that would be done, might need to be a centralized Mastodon site where moderators can redirect such topics."

Maybe Bob's notion of offering pathways to alternative channels for various topics and participants is what Sam referred to, in part, as a topic for a separate conversation. To me, the concept of the fediverse suggests that everyone can find a place to have meaningful exchanges with others who share similar interests without hijacking the entire community. If this makes sense, then how to get topics and the people who want to talk about them into places where they can do so safely would be an interesting question to pursue.

That seems sane to me (maybe with a mention that they can always bring it up with the community if we've overreached).

That being said, while I don't think it hurts to add more examples of things that we think are bad behavior, I also think we need to avoid falling into the trap that the trolls set of "well it's not explicitly laid out in the CoC therefore what I did wasn't a problem and you can't do anything about it". Just because the CoC doesn't mention a specific behavior doesn't mean we can't enforce the general spirit of the CoC.

That being said, while I don't think it hurts to add more examples of things that we think are bad behavior, I also think we need to avoid falling into the trap that the trolls set of "well it's not explicitly laid out in the CoC therefore what I did wasn't a problem and you can't do anything about it". Just because the CoC doesn't mention a specific behavior doesn't mean we can't enforce the general spirit of the CoC.

Very much agree - CWG should be empowered to remove content that is, in their judgment, harmful to the community (whether that be by chasing off members, risking defederation, or other measures). In a way that's covered by 4.5 "[I will not] Make offensive, harmful, or abusive comments or insults, particularly in relation to diverse traits (as referenced in our values above)," but I'd wholeheartedly support the addition of distinct bullet point on the topic.

I would also support some moderation guidelines about what is and is not suitable content for social.coop, which was originally created for social conversations about cooperatives.

For example, I would support ruling out some kinds of topics that are just argument-bait, like vax and anti-vax. Or any other topics that have nothing to do with cooperatives but become timeline hogs.

For example, I might enjoy mocking certain politicians but do not need to toot about it in social.coop.

The weakness of a non-zero sum outlook for interacting with others is that it doesn't work when dealing with a zero-sum person. So, if someone posts obvious disinformation, and we do nothing, we may think we're being enlightened, but we're actually approving of very destructive content spreading through our service. People should be offered more for reporting disinformation than a talk about conflict resolution (especially when it's been tried and failed) and a tall glass of "shut up."

My stance is that there are verifiable, reliable sources of information and only disinformation itself calls this into question. In fact, the purpose of disinformation is to call reality into question to make it easier to spread lies. So I post again a link that I like to use when investigating sources:

https://realityteam.org/resources/credible-sources/

I propose that we alter the CoC to include a simple procedure that does not waste time. If a post includes a known conspiracy theory it should have an immediate mark of sensitive. Same with something that can be debunked at a place like Snopes or FactCheck. If the person won't delete or modify, keeps reposting deleted things, etc, then suspend them. There may be cases where a lesser freeze/limit are appropriate, but probably not.

if someone posts obvious disinformation, and we do nothing

Well, doing nothing is not something I support or have advocated for in the slightest. Do note that a conflict-resolution process is not nothing and it doesn't help to attack it as such. Also, I have said all along that conflict-resolution should start after immediate harms are stopped. So, temporary blocking or hiding of some sort is often necessary in order to deal with emerging issues as a prerequisite to doing any conflict-resolution.

I propose that we alter the CoC…[snip]… If a post includes a known conspiracy theory it should have an immediate mark of sensitive. Same with something that can be debunked at a place like Snopes or FactCheck. If the person won't delete or modify, keeps reposting deleted things, etc, then suspend them. There may be cases where a lesser freeze/limit are appropriate, but probably not.

With my tiny edits, I fully support this proposal.

I would maybe more generically say that suspension would be appropriate for any form of not cooperating with the CWG and the process. Though I would hope that there is a healthy appeal process to have some check that the CWG is being fair and diligent. Any appeal process must be set up to not just be costly and abused.

I do not believe that social.coop was "originally created for social conversations about cooperatives". From https://wiki.social.coop/home.html: "Social.coop was founded in 2017 in the wake of the BuyTwitter campaign. Since then, we have worked toward the goal of placing ever more or our online social lives under good cooperative governance."

Since its inception, social.coop has attracted folks interested in the cooperative space, and during the last couple of community strategy discussions there has been explicit interest in fostering more collaboration and communication about cooperativism, but that still does not make social.coop a space solely for conversations about cooperativism.

If non-coop content became discouraged on social.coop, I would probably shut down my account, as I rarely post about coop stuff (I think cat pictures are probably the bulk of my contributions to the timeline).

Agreed. I did not join social.coop because it is about discussing cooperatives. I joined because I am interested in participitating in and operating in an environment of cooperative governance.

I don't mean that conflict resolution is not valid or workable, just that in some cases, it's not going to work. If someone told me that a post of mine offended them, I'd be open to altering it or deleting it if they seemed sincere.

That's a good addition or correction to what I wrote above.

I wrote

social.coop, which was originally created for social conversations about cooperatives.

which @Ana Ulin and @Scott McGerik and maybe some other people say was wrong. They are correct, I was wrong. What's the best way to erase the false impression? I don't see a way to edit my original post. So best I see to do is add corrective comments.

No big deal, it's a simple misunderstanding that has been corrected :)

Your post is sufficient! Thank you.

In a way, it was a good way to clarify what social.coop is about.

Stupid fat fingers. Gonna write this off line and then post it.

Until your post, I had not heard of consciousness raising. A search on the internet revealed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_raising on Wikipedia. 

Echoing @Ana Ulin and @Scott McGerik that I joined to participate in "the goal of placing ever more or our online social lives under good cooperative governance." Truly appreciate the quality of communication here (in Loomio), and very much value and am grateful to all of you who consistently keep up and re-cultivate the spirit of collaboration.